Marching to Zion (15 page)

Wait, John!

It took an eternity and then some, but slowly the sensible shoes descended the rest of the stairs. Each step revealed more of Minerva Fishbein to the view of Magnus Bailey, and more of Magnus Bailey to the view of Minerva Fishbein, until at last the two were face-to-face with only the brute between them. Their chests heaved, their life’s blood rose then dissolved in their veins while their heads swam in clouds of sweet, thick air. Each moved forward half-faint with emotion while the brute, seeing the gravity of their reunion, stepped aside, enabling them to fall, gloriously, into each other’s arms.

Minerva took his big
hand in her own two small ones to lead him upstairs. The vulgar harmony of squeals, yelps, groans, thumps, riotous piano scales, and a single aching horn accompanied them. Smoke, cheap perfume blended with whiskey, and the sour stench of masculine desire saturated the air. Like a knight errant assailed by a gauntlet of temptation, Bailey closed his senses to all of it and focused on the slender back of the woman he persisted in thinking his sweet young gal, the wretched victim of his cowardice, for whom he had much to make whole. They achieved the landing. She released him, unlocked a door. They entered her suite, the office first with the dressing room and bedroom beyond.

They stood, shoulder to shoulder, looking around. He took in the room carefully, trying to measure what each square foot meant about his Minnie, at how she had changed or not changed. She moved her head with his to trace his gaze. What he saw was the order and precision that had impressed Thomas DeGrace when Fishbein sent him to fetch Minerva all those years ago. Every object was pristine, set in its place with care. There was nothing superfluous, nothing without purpose. It reminded him of her childhood habits, when all hell broke loose if the maid or her tutor dared to move the slightest object and so disrupt the calm that order gave her stormy soul.

It broke his heart.

She put her hands on him and turned him to face her. They stood flushed and open and shy as if no time had passed, as if she were yet at the dawning blush of maturity and he the unscarred dandy of cocksure step and rippling palaver. The hardness of jaw, the lines of suspicion writ around the eyes, the thin set of skeptical lips vanished from their features in favor of a soft, liquid longing. They kissed, at first sweetly and then with a yawning, hungry wrench of mind and heart and soul that propelled them, stumbling, to the bed.

Magnus had few cogent thoughts during the next quarter hour. It was his life’s first intimacy with a white woman. The wonder and beauty of their skins’ contrast spurred him to a state of marvel quickly followed by the stark recognition that the pale, blue-veined woman he caressed so tenderly had had many black men, who knew how many. A lust for complete possession of her rose from his gut to sear his hands and his mouth and his sex with a fire that battered against her flesh in a chorus of moans that pled and demanded at once.

Minerva was in ecstasy.

Afterward, they were both oddly embarrassed and, lying side by side, pulled the sheets up to their chins. Magnus spoke first.

What just happened here, Minnie?

I don’t know.

What we just did could get me killed.

Not in this house, Magnus.

She propped herself up on an elbow and leaned against his chest. The mention of her business stabbed at him unexpectedly, and he frowned. She put a finger against his lips before he could speak.

This is a house where all things are possible, she said. If you knew who comes here at what hour under cover of daylight as much as night, through the front door, through the back, in company or on their own and each one lookin’ only to soothe an urge impossible to satisfy anywhere else, you’d be amazed.

She got up and slipped into a silk robe embroidered with tiny blue flowers that lay draped over a chair next to the bed and went to the dresser to open her cigarette box, picking one out, lighting it with her back to him, then turning swiftly so that her red hair lifted and stole his breath.

Amazed, I tell you! She pointed at him with the smoldering cigarette. Amazed!

She plopped down at the foot of the bed and put her free hand on his right shin, which she stroked while a big, brazen smile played over her lips. I’ve waited so long for this moment, her smile said. I regret nothing, it said, if everything I have done has brought you here.

Magnus Bailey was horrified. Where had his sweet girl gone? Was there none of her left? Confusion addled him. He could not think what next to do, what next to say.

She seized upon his hesitation. Squinting one eye and pursing her mouth, she asked, And what has brought you to my door, Magnus? After all these years.

He swallowed hard to find his voice. I was sent to find out if you knew a whore named Pearl.

At the name, she lifted her chin to a sharp, mistrustful angle. Her spine straightened. She snorted.

Pearl. Gal with a fever, maybe? Run off from here just two days ago?

Maybe.

L’il Red’s face went hard as he ever hoped to see it. Any harder and it’d shatter like glass.

That bitch. Look, if you know her, you tell her to get her skinny ass back here pronto. I got a heap of complaints about her we need to settle. I suspect she is more damn thief than whore. A l’il ole fever ain’t goin’ to get her off the hook. Huh. Pearl.

She spit out the last word like a curse. Magnus shivered.

Are you cold, darlin’? Minerva asked. I could light the fire.

Mercifully, there was a knock on the door, an insistent one, and the voice of the brute who’d answered the kitchen door earlier.

Red, Red! We need you downstairs. There’s a ruckus gettin’ started.

Giving Magnus an apologetic shrug, she yelled back to the man that she’d be right down. She got dressed in thirty seconds flat, patted her hair, stuck on shoes, and squared her shoulders, ready for whatever battle summoned her. She did it so swiftly, so calmly, she might have been a milliner called by her manager to reprimand the young girl who sewed flowers on her hatbands.

Don’t go nowhere, now, she said. I won’t be long.

No, I should be gettin’ on, he said. For his sanity, he needed to be away from there, onto the street, where the air did not oppress, where his head might not ache from too many ideas all at once driving the sense clear out of it.

You can’t leave. I won’t let you.

He started to dress, only he fumbled with sleeves and pant legs and buttons and suspenders until his cheeks went hot. He spoke without looking at her. We both need to take in what happened here tonight, he said. I’ll come back tomorrow. In the early afternoon. It’s quiet here then?

She studied him without expression. Pretty much, she answered. Most days.

Alright, the afternoon then. We’ll sit and talk. There’s lots of talkin’ we got to do.

Red! Red! came the brute’s voice again, only from farther away.

Frowning, Minerva looked from the door to Magnus Bailey and back again. There was the sound of crashing glass downstairs. A half dozen voices, male and female both, shouted, screamed, or wailed. Red! The brute’s voice rose above them all, Red! Red!

She threw open the door and stood at the landing with her hands on her hips.

If any of you bastards broke my French gilt mirror, there’ll be hell to pay, she shouted down. Without a backward glance at her prized, long-awaited lover, she marched down the stairs, sturdy afoot as a rough rider descended from his mount.

The sight of her sent Bailey into a sweat. He could not get out of there fast enough. Soon as his shoes were laced, he bounded down the service-entrance stairs and out the back door, around the corner to the front of the house and to his usual position across the street. There he stood in his customary doorway, panting, his eyes wet, his throat sore, his gaze directed at the first floor of L’il Red’s, where, according to the riot of movement and color he witnessed, pandemonium broke out, and his mind said, Minnie! What’s happened to you! Oh, Christ Almighty, I know what’s happened to you, but can it not be erased? I have my plan. I have Paree. Oh, please God, let there be a place you might go to heal our souls or I don’t know what will happen to me. Or your daddy. Or that darlin’ girl, Golde.

His head, his heart, his very skin hurt. Misery and horror at the block of ice his sweet gal had become conflicted in his thoughts with the smoldering memory of how they had joined. Perfect it was, indelible it was. Never, he thought, would he be able to match the experience of that transcendent moment when two felt the rise of one, and all the world had melted into obscurity.

The front door of L’il Red’s swung open. The brute held a scrawny white man covered in plaster dust by the scruff of his neck. He swung the man back and then tossed him out. His victim groaned, struggling to get up. He was unsteady, drunk as a lord. After looking up and down the street as if for witnesses, the brute gave the drunk’s backside a boot, and the man crumbled again. He folded his arms over his head. He begged for mercy. Under the pale green light of a gas lamp flickering over the whorehouse entrance, the brute’s face was visceral, pure in its uncloaked pleasure at battering his victim. Kick, kick, kick. There was vengeance in his zeal as the drunk took the punishment of generations of like treatment in reversed color. Bailey thought he might kill him. He was about to step forward out of decency and save the cracker when the brute stopped, bent, went through the white man’s pockets, and took whatever money he had, stuffing it swiftly in his shirt before returning to the whorehouse parlor.

Bailey darted out from his doorway. Are you alright? he asked the drunk, who’d landed at the last thrust against a lamppost.

The drunk waved Bailey away then pulled himself up the post with two hands. Once standing, he looked into Bailey’s face while a naked panic crossed over his own. With the sudden mobility to which fear and alcohol alone can spur a man, he lurched into the middle of the street and then staggered forward, zigged, zagged, reached a corner, turned, and was gone.

Shaken, Bailey made his way home deep in thought. There was so much on his mind to discuss with Minnie the next day that he had trouble ordering it all. Despite a deep reluctance, he began to understand why Fishbein had warned him that the first obstacle to enacting his grand plan would be Minnie herself. Her corruption was more profound than he’d dared to imagine. Her depravity would not wash away in an afternoon, a week, a month, or even years. How could he expect to cut the rot from her? She loved him still. He saw that in her face, in the way she’d studied him softly, unblinking, while he held her, in all the startling ways she’d moved to please him, to give him pleasure. He lost himself reliving those fifteen minutes of rapture, and hope was reborn in him.

When he entered The Lenaka, he did not pause to wonder why the door was unlocked although the hour had grown late. Such banal concerns were beneath his lofty, difficult reflections on wrenching light out of darkness, purity from filth. With his head down, his lips moving as he recited to himself the arguments he might try on Minerva Fishbein the next day, he walked through the beaded curtain that led to the kitchen at the back of the shop and then, untying his tie, he continued to the parlor when Aurora Mae’s voice muttering in a language he did not know came to him. He lifted his gaze to the sight of a most curious tableau.

Lying on the carpet tightly wound from ankles to clavicle in a white sheet, her eyes closed, her arms crossed over her chest, and holding a sprig of lavender between her hands was what looked like a dead, laid-out whore named Pearl. On the couch facing her sat Aurora Mae, dressed in the tasseled robe of many colors she wore for special occasions. Her hair was wrapped up in a scarf that came together at her brow in a starched fan. She balanced an unlit brazier filled with herbs and spices in her broad lap. Beside her was a dish that held pieces of broken blue glass, and next to that was the round, black-suited, white-collared bald man with tiny feet, Dr. Willie Smalls.

What on earth? …

So intense was the concentration of the participants that Aurora Mae and Dr. Willie jumped in a start while the whore named Pearl took in a sudden, deep breath but managed to keep her eyes closed and her hands still. At least she’s not dead yet, thought Bailey. My goodness, my goodness.

Magnus, Aurora Mae said in a whisper, please don’t say another word. You’ll break the spell. Just leave the room or sit down over there by the window and hush up. I’ll explain when we’re done.

She lit the brazier and swung it over the whore from her head to her toes and then crosswise, too, while chanting a phrase that to Bailey’s ear sounded like the half-African talk coastal coloreds used. At the same time, Dr. Willie knelt next to the whore’s head holding a large crucifix over her while he called out in English to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Jee-sus! Save this poor child and cast from her the evil one that chains her soul! he said. I cast you out, evil one! In Jee-sus’ name!

The reverend commenced with a lot of malaka-malaka-maloo, what Bailey suspected was a variety of the speaking in tongues he’d heard now and again at revivals up and down the river during his childhood and again during his bargeman days. A piece of showmanship on every occasion, he was sure, but he had to admit old Willie carried it off pretty well. Swallowing his disdain, he watched while Aurora Mae placed bits of blue glass all around the gal’s body. The two officiants joined hands, spoke over her some more, and then they were done. Sweat dripped from both their brows, landing in drops on the gal’s shoulder and hip respectively. The whore Pearl fluttered her eyelids and then sat up.

Water, she croaked.